James M. Cain – författare

Following her husband's death in an accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet. At the job she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer and a wealthy but unwell older man who rewards her for her attentions with a $50,000 tip and an unconventional offer of marriage...

A true crime masterpiece, and highly acclaimed 1940s movie'DOUBLE INDEMNITY is among the finest of all American novels, regardless of genre or style' LA TIMES'Cain is the master' Tom WolfeDOUBLE INDEMNITY is the classic tale of an evil woman motivated by greed who corrupts a weak man motivated by lust.Walter Huff is an insurance investigator like any other until the day he meets the beautiful and dangerous Phyllis Nirdlinger and falls under her spell. Together they plot to kill her husband and split the insurance. It'll be the perfect murder . . .

'One of the great crime novels of all time' Tony Parsons, Express'Nobody has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler' Tom Wolfe'It is no accident that movies based on three [of Cain's novels] helped to define the genre known as film noir' NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS'The most starkly elemental thing that has been written for years' EVENING STANDARDThe torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has become a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America.

'Cain was not just a great hard-boiled novelist but a great novelist, period ... To read MILDRED PIERCE now is to experience a double vision, in which we confront both how much and how little things have changed' LA TIMES'Vivid, gritty, real...this is crime writing at its very best' MY WEEKLYMildred Pierce is the story of a determined and ambitious woman who, after her feckless husband abandons her, by hard work and sacrifice builds a successful business to ensure the future of her pampered and selfish daughter. But she isn't prepared for the intrigues and devastating betrayals of those closest to her. This is James M. Cain's most substantial novel and a classic of the Depression years.

'Cain has established a formidable reputation of furious pace, harsh and masterful realism, tough, raw speech right out of the mouths of the people' SATURDAY REVIEWSerenade is the story of the eternal triangle - with a difference. John Howard Sharp is an American opera singer down on his luck, having just bombed in Rigoletto in Mexico City when he first encounters the beautiful Mexican-Indian prostitute called Juana. Miraculously, she offers him the chance to rebuild his career in Hollywood and New York but then Winston Hawes, the young, rich and well-connected conductor who had first launched Sharp, comes back into his life with terrible consequences.